New Tutorial on Flash Accessibility

by Andrew Kirkpatrick

Created

We have a brand new tutorial to check out if you are interested in Flash accessibility. We worked with our good friends at Knowbility in Austin, TX, and Flash accessibility expert Thea Eaton of Doodledoo to create a very useful tutorial, which is itself built in Flash. The tutorial introduces Flash accessibility topics, and is accessible for screen reader and magnifier users, and includes closed captions for users who are deaf or hard-of-hearing and audio descriptions for blind or low-vision users.
You can view the tutorial at http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/flash/tutorial/.
If you prefer in-person training, you should check out Knowbility’s Access U Conference, which just took place in May, but is worth watching out for in the future also since Knowbility runs training events regularly.

COMMENTS

By Harald F - 1:26 PM on July 10, 2009

Hi there,
first of all I want to say: Thanks for posting this article. At this time I write on my theoretical bachelor thesis. The title of my work is “Creating accessible Web content in Adobe Flash” and so I have to ask you a few critical questions about this.
First (I hope I don’t disgrace myself) but I saw at the Tutorial that it is possible to change the colour management of an Flash application, but I don’t know how, In Flex i can do this with an external CSS file but in Flash?
And the most important question I have is: Is it possible to get the focus on my Flash Application when I am in a Web browser, with out using the mouse? Because without using my Mouse I can start my Pc, start my Web browser and go to the URL I ever want. But when I am on a site with a Flash element I can’t get the focus on it, so that I can navigate with the Tab key in it.
And I can’t believe that Adobe did a great job like this and forgot an as important thing like this? Did everyone know how I can get the focus of the Tabulator into the flash application when I am in a Web browser?

By P Rees - 11:05 PM on July 12, 2009

Andrew,
The new tutorial is a great overview of what should and can be done. What many of us really need are .fla files so we can open and examine them and see how your examples are actually put together. Providing the .fla file for the tutorial would be a great start. I would really like to see .fla file examples where a moderately complicated flash game has been made accessible using both the accessibility panel and the ActionScript method. If there is already somewhere that I could download actual .fla files for examples of accessible flash, please provide the info. Thanks.

By marvin hunkin - 6:52 AM on July 17, 2009

hi. did enjoy the flash tutorial. but could not seem to get the description reading when i tried to enable it using jaws 10, internet explorer 7 and on a vista machine. is there a way to download the audio as well. also where can i get the flash kit to start developing flash applications. are thre any other tutorials for getting started in flash regarding accessibility. cheers Marvin.

By Claus Thøgersen - 9:54 AM on September 14, 2009

HI,
It is good to have a resource that we can point developpers to when they want to make their content accessable! With JAWS I have a problem with the shortcut keys, none of them seem to work, even with the navigation quick keys turned off, and not when I use the ability to send a keystroke to the application. Am I missing something obvious here?